A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  It was not an exciting display, but the food was well cooked and there was sufficient. Memories of magazine spreads with the tables’ momentous works of gelatines and ices, in sandwiches and open glazed tarts, came to Vinny as she looked at the plain sponges, the neat fishpaste sandwiches and the rolls. There was difficulty in seating the guests, too, for Vinny was quite determined that Pearl Warburton would not be placed either on her right or on her left. Finally, safe more or less, between the Welches, she poured syrup into tumblers – making sure to keep the chipped one for herself – and handed them round in silence.

  ‘I’d prefer tea, thank you, Mrs. Lalor,’ Pearl said. She smirked swiftly at her friends. ‘That’s if it’s no trouble.’

  Started by the self-assurance, the older woman said, ‘Why, no, it’s no trouble. I did intend making some later. It won’t be a minute.’

  The rolls and the sandwiches made an unenthusiastic round, during which the guests discussed a gigantic meal they had once had at the Turtons’. Mrs. Lalor brought in the tea in the dented silver pot and Vinny realised her mother was making an effort to impress. She could have wept with love and shame – but mainly shame.

  ‘With lemon,’ Pearl said, graciously declining the milk. ‘And two lumps.’

  All the incidents of the afternoon became huge intolerable rocks in the avalanche of Vinny’s anger – the presents, the sneers at the furniture, the talk about her brother, the prissy dissatisfaction with food of which she too was ashamed – the whole thing roared its tumult through her mind and hurtled from her lips.

  ‘We only have this sort of sugar!’ she shouted. ‘We don’t have lump sugar. Only this, Pearl, only this awful old ordinary sugar.’

  She kept saying the words, ‘this awful old ordinary sugar’ over and over, and, as if unable to stop and unaware of her action, had risen to her feet and was leaning forward, her arms jerking with rage. She shook the sugar bowl in the other girl’s face and Mrs. Lalor gasped a protest.

  ‘Vinny, what’s up with you? What’s got into you?’

  ‘It’s her!’ she yelled, now beside herself and enjoying the scene. ‘Nothing’s right. All she does is sneer and criticise us.’ She swung sharply round on Pearl. ‘Why do you stay?’ Pearl listened appreciatively, her full red lips moist and ever so slightly curved into the crescent of a smile. ‘Why don’t you go home instead of crumbling our cake into little bits to shove to one side. Go home and whisper about Royce. Go on!’ She summoned all her courage for the final insult. ‘You bitch!’ she said.

  The room became for a second very still. Then Mrs. Lalor, moving swiftly to a misapplied vengeance, was also unaware of her action until it was completed. The shock of her hard palm rang against Vinny’s thin face with dreadful concussion.

  ‘I won’t have those kinds of words,’ her mother said. Trying to explain this uncontrolled situation to herself. ‘You got to apologise, Vinny, because I won’t have it, see.’

  The girl stared at her mother, the bright red of the hand print on one cheek and the other cheek paper-white. Then without a word she pushed her chair roughly aside and raced from the table down the hall to her bedroom. In its dimness she shoved the dressing table quickly against the door and then flung herself, fingers pressed to her ears, upon the quilt among the paper wrappings and the gifts. Faintly she could hear her mother ordering and then pleading with her to come out, but she would neither move nor answer, and after a while the visitors left, all sounds died away, and the tears came at last to comfort her spasmodically until long after darkness drifted into the room.

  Lying in the darkness now, Vinny saw the whole afternoon telescoped into a brief minute of shameful memory. Her mother had questioned her later about her behaviour, but she had not explained why she had become so angry and she did not talk about what she had so nearly heard in the acalyphas. But ever afterwards she felt cut off from Royce almost entirely, and certainly from her mother. She blamed her for the failure of the entire affair. With the sweeping generalizing of the adolescent she turned all her affection upon Mrs. Striebel, and cultivated what might have been a mere ‘crush’ into a disproportionately deep attachment. As the end of the year drew near, she made in the back of her work pad a calendar of schooldays with the periods to be taken by Mrs. Striebel numbered off. She dreaded their ending, for nothing awaited her after the public examinations were over but a job in a Gympie office – if she were lucky – shifting figures from one column and one ledger to another, sifting the relationship of money and goods.

  Down the hall came the distant crash of the back door and her mother’s voice raised in protest as Royce clumped noisily to his tiny den off the side veranda. Vinny frowned and twisted under the worn sheets. She shut her eyes and Mrs. Striebel, dark and adorable, loomed up between the bloodwoods and filled the sky with sleep.

  Three

  Robert Moller yawned stalely into the spring. He started up the decrepit Buick and then backed it down the drive and out on the roadway. Ruth Lunbeck waved over armfuls of flowers and gardening shears, poised with just that right amount of poetry above nature. Her hard, pale face foolished a smile under expensive leg-horn and brand new linen and tweed. He smiled back perfunctorily and then groaned softly to himself and twisted the side of his mouth away from her downwards into an expression of contempt. With a roar the car vibrated into life and wrapped watcher and watched in an orange screen of dust – a fact that he endured with pleasure as he thought of the new clothes and the agitation behind him.

  When he pulled in by the hotel Helen and Vinny were there waiting, Helen with a large overnight bag and Vinny with a hat box. Behind them, through the half doors of the pub, the noise of the drinkers – the morning shift from the factory – rolled out in a blurred wordy wordlessness. Behind the press of workmen Moller could glimpse Farrelly, trim as a bottle and an impersonal dispenser, playing the cash register like a miniature organ, venturing into passacaglias based on short-measure and short-change and tips. Helen followed the direction of Moller’s sardonic smile.

  ‘The moment of truth,’ she murmured to Moller, nodding towards the bar.

  ‘How right. In with you both.’ He jerked open the front door for Helen and then leant back and opened the rear door for the child. ‘You’ll have to put up with my ungentlemanliness,’ he said to them as he took Helen’s bag and slung it on the rear seat. ‘We’re running a bit late. The damned engine played up again.’ He let in the clutch and the car moved forwards. ‘Yes. Friend Farrelly simply thrives in the odour of sanctity.’

  Vinny sat forward close to the window, grinning nervously with excitement. Her hair had been combed back hard with water and shone pleasantly above her best jacket and skirt. On her lap she held a bottle-green coat that, Helen knew, long before it proved the fact, would be several sizes too large. Helen laid her hand for a minute on Moller’s plump knee bulging beneath his shiny sports trousers and he patted it in a businesslike way.

  For each of the three the journey held the magic of giving or receiving or of helping to give or to receive. Caught in a present temporal elation, bounced into unison on worn leather and ageing springs, they received impressions of slope and hill distance in melting spaces between the telegraph poles and the blurred oneness of the fence-posts. The road twisted south and east from the township, and then south again, once the hill cupping the town had been crested, and moved ahead of them in the mild September afternoon amongst flat grey shadows.

  A mile or so out of Gungee, near the beach turn-off, Rose Jarman’s car passed them with her future husband (though she did not know it) lovingly fondling the wheel. A stuttering shriek of the horn and the big black car skimmed them so closely they could still read the obscenity some school wit had fingered on the dusty duco of the boot. Moller grunted with annoyance as he pulled the car in closer to the road edge.

  ‘There goes one of the seven wise virgins,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mean Rose.’

&nb
sp; Helen laughed. ‘Shush!’ she said softly. ‘We have a passenger, remember?’

  Moller grinned and nodded good naturedly. ‘I’m suffering from a severe attack of week-end. I’ll be careful, I promise.’

  Now that he had arrived at his decision, had achieved a certain exposition of his feelings, he was conscious of an astounding relief. Whether or not his decision would prove wise for himself or for Helen or even Lilian, who still made claims on his conscience, he did not know, though he was, naturally enough, much given in his frequent analyses of the situation to a specious form of rationalizing that applauded his purpose. He sought the self’s bright centre, urged by tempest in his own blood, and now was happy that he might in future let slip aside each day’s disguise and loosen the sophisticate masks that plied chalks and words of reprimand and menial actions into an impression of surface acceptability.

  They raced over Eumundi’s green hills in the limelight of five o’clock, down through deepening tones in paddocks and trees under a threatening spread of nimbus moving in from the sea-line.

  ‘God! Not this week-end,’ Moller pleaded, glancing up at the sky. And then, ‘Wie bist du meine Königin,’ he sang in a sudden exhilaration, on key and fulsomely exaggerating. He da-dahed the piano accompaniment that followed and Vinny blushed frantically at the sight of her lords relaxing. ‘Happy, Helen? Happy, Vinny?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied shyly, and turned to look at the racing scrub under the racing sky.

  ‘Well, baby, I’m happy. Happy to be out of school and out of town. You’ll have to excuse us, Vinny, and be very tactful if you see Mrs. Striebel and myself acting like escaped prisoners. We are. So relax, my child. We are normal under the job exterior.’

  Vinny pulled her coat over her thin knees and pressed them hard against each other. She swelled with happiness and looked at the backs of the two adult heads in front of her with uncritical pleasure, denying their physical faults and seeing in them a near-Olympian beauty.

  ‘Back to your Brahms,’ Helen suggested softly as they passed over the shallow reaches of the Maroochy River with its mud flat stampings of greyish white below the bridge. So he resumed singing and passed through the matching inflections of Daumer’s words and Brahms’ music until he reached the end of the first stanza:

  ‘Wie bist du meine Königin,

  durch sanfte Güte wonnevoll:

  Du lächle nur,

  Lenzdüfte weh’n durch mein

  Gemüthe wonnevoll, wonnevoll.’

  Both Helen and Moller were aware of the emotion behind this half-clowned performance of one of the loveliest songs either knew; and Vinny, sitting quietly and embarrassedly in the back seat, became apprehensive of an adult emotion in the air that she could not fathom. She felt, too, a curious stirring jealousy as she, the acolyte, watched them, the priests, performing a wordless, actionless rite in front of her.

  The sky was nearly dark now, only hachured by drizzle that had whispered across them since passing the Buderim plateau. The ginger and pineapple farms lay mistily under the quiet rain through which they could still see the big sawdust mulch heaps lying damply along roadside and paddock fences. Moller set the windscreen wiper going and they drove for a long while in silence under the steadily increasing rain that barricaded, with points of quiet on the canvas roof, the car and its three occupants. Rain stipple and trees and the sudden chromatic gurglings of a creek freshet. Ngungun loomed up in the rain, its huge hump of trachyte theatening the sky, and then Tibrogargan and Beerburrum crowded in upon them, black and ugly and well loved by Moller, who passed them every week-end with a sense of journeying half done.

  Today each familiar section of road, each familiar action with the car whose foibles were old friends, had become endued with a newer connotation. The lights of Caboolture, blurred and wet, sucked them into the main street, and by a corner store the car shuddered and pulled up in the racing gutter. Moller dived out his side and splashed into a bright doorway, reappearing in a short time with pies and chips. Helen wiped his shoulders and hair with a scarf she had tucked in her coat pocket, and then they ate noisily and happily in the half-light, with the roar of the storm-water drains right below them.

  ‘A pity,’ Helen said as the rain thudded and thumped on the roof of the car and splashed in under the mica window screens. ‘But we shan’t let it spoil our two days, Vinny. Never fear.’

  ‘I like it,’ Vinny said. She bit off half a chip. The hot potato burnt her tongue and she let it fall back into the paper. ‘I feel cosy like this. I wish this journey could go on for hours.’

  ‘It will if this rain keeps up.’ Moller glanced at his watch. ‘We’re twenty minutes behind on my normal schedule. I shall have to put my foot down and keep it there if we’re going to reach the city by seven-thirty.’

  ‘Must we?’ Helen was surprised that anyone so normally uninterested in routine or the appearances of it should have this particular compulsion.

  ‘Helen. It’s my old bomb’s reputation that’s at stake. And besides, I forgot to ring my people and let them know I was coming. It’s unlikely, but they may be out after eight and I’ll be left homeless in this filthy weather until they return. Unless you like to take me in.’

  He crumpled the newspaper from round his chips and tossed it out of the window where the rainwaters snatched it away in a flash.

  ‘There she goes,’ he said, peering out after it in the darkness, ‘running a banker.’ He watched the sadness of the runnels under the lamplight awash with twig and paper and leaf, the exhausted cartons of week-old theatre crowds damming the gratings in grimy piles. He rolled himself a cigarette, lit it, and turned to Helen and then to Vinny. ‘Well, you girls? Are you ready?’

  Helen nodded with her mouth full and Vinny said, ‘Yes’, as she scooped up a lump of pie gravy from her skirt and popped it into her mouth. She had never been so happy. Absent-mindedly she rubbed at the stain with a corner of her coat and then abandoned the idea as the car spluttered and started. Taken hold of by a common feeling of irresponsibility they sang current popular songs loudly for most of the way.

  ‘ “I don’t wanner set the world – on – fiyuh,” ’ Moller roared through the beating rain. ‘ “I jus’ wanner start – a littul flame in your heart!” ’ He accelerated sharply with each strong beat. Vinny giggled delightedly and timorously joined in.

  Helen sank down more deeply into the seat and huddled under the warmth of her coat, her head dizzy from the small enclosed space that was stuffy with the smell of damp upholstery and petrol. Soon she was merely a voice augmenting from time to time the undiminishingly cheerful singing of the other two; her eyes, dazzled from watching the headlamps flinging the crouching country back in elongated stripes of yellow, gradually closed. She was reminded of a similar pattern – the truck drives in each week-end with the workmen, bucketing between the school where she was a five-day boarder to her home near the town filter beds. Along the old Moggill Road at night under glacial stars above and cigarette ends burning stars around her in the darkness, with the smells of sweat and earth and cold wet grass and gums, and then the river opening up beyond the trees a sheet of argentine light. Huddled with knees knocking and ‘sorry miss’ and trying to doze against the back of the driver’s cabin on the cold winters evenings flaming with frost. It all seemed to be part of the present, until Moller would pat her kindly in the dark, bringing her back to the actual now; or until she could hear him snarling at another car, ‘Dip them, you bloody fool! Dip them!’

  It was pleasant, she thought, remembering Vinny’s thin face eager-bright under the wavering street light at Caboolture, to be performing a charity; pleasant to balance in part the guilt sense that coloured her mind when she thought of Moller. She wished Lilian were cruel or domineering or repulsive physically, but in fact she was none of these things. Confronted with an overwhelming illness, she had, Robert said, become, naturally enough, more and more int
olerant of daily ministering to her person on the part of nurses or friends. She had grown farther and farther away from all the interests she had once indulged. With the withering of her limbs her mental life seemed to be dying away, too. Helen wished there were some alternative solution to her present situation other than physical fulfilment. She could, she knew, deny that it existed. But that would be false also. And in the darkness she sighed and leant her head against the hard edge of the window, suffering the discomfort with determined self-punishment. Rhomboids of windscreen glow lit her wide pale face, her hands, locked for warmth, not in humility or supplication, upon the heavy stuff of her coat. She picked away the torn crescent of a finger-nail and abandoned her problem to the scattered lights of the outer suburbs.

  The suburbs scrabbled into the greenness and at night their lights pricked into darkness with edges furred now from rain. The lights came with increasing frequency until at last they crowded together along the treeless streets with their meagre gardens. The street lights splashed every twenty yards a puddle of yellow on slippery bitumen or white bus stop or shelter shed. The first brightly lit tram scuttling away with its explosions of green light on the overhead wires was for the three of them a quick urban excitement, a severing from Gungee that lay behind them at this moment with its facets of work and friendship and friendlessness as unreal.

  ‘There, kid,’ Moller said over his shoulder to Vinny. ‘There’s the big, exciting city.’ He laughed at the loneliness of tramline and at himself. ‘Packed with people and movement and pulsating life.’ He stared along the wet empty road. ‘Not even a damn’ dog. Oh, bloody weather!’